Apocalyptic Conspiracism

In the USA, politically conservative and right-wing apocalyptic evangelicals hold that climate change science and Covid-19 are fabrications governed by manifest evil. How do these groups generate and distribute these truth-claims and why? Using a sociological methodology informed by Bourdieu and Foucault, this book offers tools for scholars and students to better understand the logic of climate denial within the context of American conservative evangelicalism and apocalypticism. Tom Albrecht and Tristan Sturm coin and employ the term apocalyptic conspiracism to analyse the increasingly powerful confluence of apocalyptic and conspiracist discourses. These dialogues create a holistic belief system, which claims that the world will profoundly change for the worse due to a global network of interconnected conspiracies. This book focuses on and expands the literature on the discursive practices of anthropogenic climate change and Covid-19 denialism. Exploring religious, apocalyptic, and conspiracist belief systems, the authors demonstrate how these affect geopolitical imaginations, the perception of global crises, as well as the environmentally relevant behaviour of American Evangelical Christians.

Tom Albrecht is Visiting Scholar in Geography at Queen's University Belfast, UK.

1. Introduction: Apocalyptic Conspiracism as a Way of Comprehending Crises
Part I: Knowledge Geographies of Apocalyptic Conspiracism
2. Social Epistemology, Power, and Climatic Counter-Knowledge
3: Analysing Digital Knowledge Discourses/Spaces
Part II: American Evangelical Apocalyptic Conspiracism on Climate Change
4: American Evangelicalism, the Environment, and Apocalyptic Conspiracism
5: The Construction of Evangelical Apocalyptic Conspiracist Climate Change Discourses
6: Generation of Evangelical Apocalyptic Climate Counter-Knowledge
Part III: Apocalyptic Conspiracist Geopolitics and its Flexibility
7: Climate Change and Evangelical Apocalyptic Geopolitics
8: Evangelical and Secular Conspiracist Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic
9. Conclusion: Apocalyptic Friends and the Truth of the End
Bibliography
Index